Stigma Not Bug, But Feature

Posters are popping up in subway stations and bus stops giving statistics about teen pregnancy that show cute little kids saying things like, “Honestly, Mom … chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” and “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.”

(Based on a recent CBS report, the kid could add, “Then again, I’m in the New York City public school system, so even if I graduate I won’t be able to read.”)

It’s one thing to stigmatize “Big Gulp” drinkers, but liberals are hopping mad at this attempt to stigmatize teen pregnancy, 90 percent of which is unwed. To put it another way, if you’re a New York teen with a distended belly these days, it had better be because you’re pregnant.

Instead, Morales suggested “helping teens access health care, birth control and high-quality sexual and reproductive health education.” Like the kind they got before becoming pregnant, you mean? Are you new here, Haydee?

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72 Responses to Stigma Not Bug, But Feature

Re: What color is the sky in your world? Shame has been quite successful in changing behavior throughout the ages.

I agree that La Lubu’s comment is pretty silly. Shame is a powerful way to change behaviour. More generally, the sense that you’re being watched and under scrutiny is a powerful way to change behaviour (one of the most powerful). My problem with this shaming teen moms campaign isn’t that it wouldn’t work, it’s that it would work too well, towards a completely undesirable end. It would encourage more of these teenagers to have abortions. Having more teen moms in our society is a price I’m happy to pay in order to have less abortions. And I’d point out, too, that since upper-middle-class liberal-feminist women tend not to be having *enough* children, I find it hard to be too critical of these teenagers for keeping up our national birth rate.

I don’t think that having a baby should be treated as something immoral or worthy of shame and stigma. On the contrary, women who choose not to have an abortion- whether they’re 17 or 40- deserve to be praised, celebrated and supported, for choosing life. I think having kids as a teen is very often a bad idea (though I think the average age of first childbearing, for women, should be lower than it is today, not higher). But you know, often it works out fine. And we could ensure that it worked out better, if we had a better social support system for young mothers. It’s certainly not the worst thing in the world.

Re: But I think the growing acceptance of teen and unwed motherhood in general during my lifetime — mostly not in the professional classes, as noted — is the understanding and fear that doing this encourages abortions, that if you are asking young women to choose life, you can’t also say “and we will shame you forever for doing so.” So instead women get celebrated to a certain extent for getting pregnant and not aborting (and we seem to have given up on adoption as a choice for most, which I think is sad).

Adoption is a tricky business, often incredibly traumatic both for the mother and the child. (Although the increasing trend towards open adoptions is a good thing, and needs to be encouraged). Other than that, though, I totally agree with you. More women having children in non-ideal situations, is a price we need to pay for having less abortions.

Anyone who’s followed my comments on this blog knows that I have just about zero liking or fondness for Planned Parenthood. I think they’re a pretty disgusting organisation, all in all. But I have just about equal disdain for the cultural-elite types who think that having a baby too young is something only trashy sl*ts and losers do.

Also: I think it’s pretty questionable whether having a child as a late teenager is that bad for your economic or educational prospects, to begin with. That’s the assumption around which this whole conversation is premised, but it’s also a fairly doubtful one. You could equally well argue that the same traits (lower IQ, lower future-orientation, etc.) which make you less likely to finish school or get a good job, also make it less likely for you to carefully use contraception or to have an abortion. You could also argue that people with fewer economic or educational prospects are more likely to get pregnant as teenagers because they have fewer rational economic reasons to delay pregnancy.

I believe that teenage pregnancy probably has *some* causal relationship to poorer economic prospects down the road, but I also suspect the link is pretty weak, that many teen moms are making rational decisions, and that most of the poorer outcomes for teen moms and their children are not due to the fact that they had kids too early. On the list of social problems that need addressing, teen pregnancy is way down the list.

Widely available contraception seems to lower teen pregnancy, as we’ve seen in northern Europe (which also tends to have rather low abortion rates). Latin America has also seen declines in both the birthrate and the abortion rate in the recent past as contraception gets more widespread. So I don’t think we would really have more unplanned pregnancy, particularly if contraception were combined with tougher laws against abortion.

I think shame does work – or stigmatizing does – and the left has no problem stigmatizing people on issues they are in favor of – stigmatizingis a tactic routinely used re: Gay rights. And fear of that shaming keeps people from expressing opinions or even expressing reservations. I see that all the time re: feminist issues – women are literally afraid to bring up concerns or doubts because they fear the social shaming that will for sure occur.

You all realize that our entire public criminal justice system is predicated to a large extent on shaming as a preventative measure not a cure for an after the fact occurance. Miss Coulter and Mayor Bloombreg (who actually got one right) are on target and bravo for them.

Shame is a motivator fro all of us. It’s what keeps us moderately respectful of others. It prevents all maner of ill behavior.

That is the purpose of shame. To make, note of what is acceptable and beneficial behavior.

Whether or not these children will ab ort their children instead is highly doubtful as they could have done so anyway.

A message for tenn girls: And bravo and bully for them for having them. Those of who approve of shame as a mechanism for behavior modification are not in any manner upset with your choice to have children — delightful. We would just like you to have a husband and/or your HS diploma, or college degree(s) first. Better for you, better for your child, better for the country . . .

This is off-topic, but I guess I’m wondering what Hector finds disgusting about Planned Parenthood.

The fact that they provide healthcare for poor women?

The fact that they provide contraception and education for women?

The fact that they provide cancer screening and tests for STDs? (My nephew took advantage of this while he was attending a Catholic U where the clinic would not provide testing for STDs, since the students weren’t supposed to be having sex.)

I guess if you’re anti-choice, the good they do might be outweighed (for you) by the fact that they also provide women who want them with abortions — is that what Hector finds so disgusting? That PP allows women the choice that is legally theirs in this country?

I’m not a regular consumer of Ann Coulter. I read her about as often as I have a Big Gulp. But I’ve got to say that when you’ve got a hankering to hate a liberal, she’s good stuff. I’m really hating liberals right now after reading that piece — and I’m really enjoying it!

” I think having kids as a teen is very often a bad idea (though I think the average age of first childbearing, for women, should be lower than it is today, not higher). But you know, often it works out fine. And we could ensure that it worked out better, if we had a better social support system for young mothers…

“*** It’s certainly not the worst thing in the world.***”

Good point! Teen pregnancy is not ideal but by all means it’s not a catastrophe. And furthermore, it’s the way we do things today. It’s our culture. It’s here to stay for the foreseeable future — until the cliff arrives.

I have no faith in sex ed/contraceptives to change it, none. Open a window and take a look at where that has taken us.

Neither do I have any faith in abstinence ed either. It’s just got the wrong spin on it. Yes they’re right, but not it’s not working.

When it comes to sex, we are a delusional, addicted people. Nothing short of a sexual counter-revolution will knock back to our senses.

I’m pro-life (in a sense, I suppose some would call me PLINO for voting for Democrats). Planned Parenthood makes a great deal of their money performing abortions, most of which have no medical justification at all. And then they hire lobbyists to describe what they do as women’s liberation, or something. Of course I find them disgusting. This isn’t complicated.

Yeah, its a good idea to give teens a negative view of becoming pregnant while teens, and unmarried. That’s different from casting a stigma on teens who ARE pregnant or DO have children.

Hector’s point on Planned Parenthood reminds me that once upon a time the organization ran on volunteers. But, since the “business model” of non-profit organization becoming “the latest thing,” Planned Parenthood has been caught up in looking for what produces the greatest revenue. There’s a lot more dollars in abortions than in handing out free contraceptives.

Case in point, says my mother the Republican and Planned Parenthood volunteer, why trying to run a non-profit like a business is absurd.

It is a nonsensical to say that abstinence/celibacy don’t work. No method of prevention works that is not practiced. As advocate of both (if a difference is distinguishable) I can say without a doubt that they work 100% of the time. And as the most full proof method it seems self defeating not to present them in conjunction with other methods which also don’t work if they are not practiced.

The problem with planned parenthood is that they support the murder of children. Turning the screw on their providing other services and therefore should be supported is like arguing that I should excuse an accessory to murder because they do other good in the community. While it may serve as to sentencing it does little of relieving one of fostering criminal intent and behavior. Now of course I understand the response: it’s legal. but I think my point is understood. No one faults tax dollars in providing some health measures to men or women. One would think they would target men as men have a much higher death rate than women from catastrophic illnesses and events. The advocacy as this is a women’s gig is suspicious for women make up only one wife of the parentage of a family.

2. whether the receiver of the message of intended shame understand s that it not merely to belittle

3. the method and circumstance in which it occurs.

4. Finally, that the actors have some manner of relationship in which the shame is predicated on training as opposed to merely shaming.

The contention that shame is inappropriate is solely dependent on these criteria and others.

Having served in the military played on athletic teams, counselor, instructor as well as a coach and trainer shaming intended merely to bring one down a peg or two — are counter productive. As no one that I have ever known is so perfected that they could engage in such bullying to the good. This type of shame can accrue the consequence liberals moan about: creating self destructive behaviors, bullying or a combination of both. I am thinking of George Herbert Meade and Blumers identity creation models.

Well, Hector (and JJ), I know you’ve been told that. Do you have any evidence to back it up? (Can you provide a citation, in other words? Or are you just repeating what you’ve been told by others?)

PP is a non-profit. They don’t make money. Nor do they force abortions on women who don’t want them, or lure women into their clinics to con them into getting abortions. Women who go to their clinics for abortions (or other health care) want (and need, in many cases) those services.

You don’t get to decide what a woman needs. That woman gets to decide what she needs.

They have a chart of the number of people served. Abortions account for 3%. They have the standard, summarized tables and charts for revenues and expenses. 75% of their expenses are for health care services. If you can find credible numbers for the actual costs of the service involved, including abortion procedures, I find it ridiculous in the extreme that you (general) can justify a statement like There’s a lot more dollars in abortions than in handing out free contraceptives[.] especially when about 72% of their revenues come from government grants and reimbursements (about 54%) and private donations and grants (about 18%).

Case in point: I arbitrarily found one PP provider who listed a range for abortion services whose median is $417.50, multiplied it by the number of abortions provided in the PP Annual Report, and got the rounded number $140 million. Their total budget for that fiscal year was a bit over $1 billion.

Accurate numbers are surely capable of being calculated. I safely predict that none of them will come close to supporting hyperbolic rhetoric such as that found here.

EliteCommInc, it is true that just because something is legal, doesn’t mean its the right thing to do. Tobacco use is legal, but I have never chosen to use tobacco products. When marijuana is legalized, I probably won’t choose to use that either.

But only in the subjective framework of those who prefer to believe is abortion the “murder” of “children.” What is growing in the first twenty weeks or so is not a child at all. What may be aborted in a tiny percentage of cases in the last few weeks is only legal to abort if the mother’s life is in danger, which amounts to justifiable homicide, bordering on self-defense.

Franklin, your stats may be right. I’ve been giving pro-lifers the benefit of the doubt that at least they have their facts together, even if they are wrong about what it means. Perhaps they’ve been making their numbers up out of whole cloth.

There remains the possibility that government grants pay for the free stuff, and abortions bring in the money.

I don’t especially care if abortions make up 1% or Planned Parenthood’s income, or 99%. Either way, they’re the biggest provider of prenatal murder-for-hire (oh sorry ‘termination of pregnancy’) in America.

Re: Nor do they force abortions on women who don’t want them, or lure women into their clinics to con them into getting abortions. Women who go to their clinics for abortions (or other health care) want (and need, in many cases) those services.

No, they don’t *need* an abortion, unless there are serious health threats. They may *want* one, but that’s a very different thing. We all want things which are bad for us and for others, and part of the role of a healthy society is to be able to tell us ‘No’. Unfortunately, we live in America, and the motto we live by here is ‘Baby wants what baby wants’.

Forced abortions are a bit worse than voluntary abortions, since they add the element of force to the mix, but they’re really two aspects to the same thing, and they share the same *inherent* nature. I don’t see why a woman choosing to kill her child is that much worse than some third party choosing it for her.

Re: You don’t get to decide what a woman needs. That woman gets to decide what she needs.

Nonsense. By that logic, Rod’s kids should get to decide that they really don’t ‘need’ to eat vegetables for their supper. And I notice you’re totally ignoring the key person here, the one who’se interests need the most protection, which is the unborn child.

Hector, the simple truth is that many pregnant women sought abortions while they were illegal, men exploited them and many of them died. The simple truth is that abortion was a fact of life for women before Roe v. Wade. Until the anti-abortion rhetoric starts with “We will stop demonizing pregnant women,” has “We will do our utmost to support pregnant women through the child’s second year of life” (which, by the way, means making quality, safe and affordable child care a national priority) in the middle, and ends with “We are committed to making legal abortions unnecessary;” and you avoid sermonizing at every point in between, then I and many liberals will sit up and take notice.

The simple truth is that throughout this time in our majority Christian nation it is a ridiculously easy bet that the majority of abortions have been and continue to be performed on Christian women. The entire morality message has been smoke in the wind for decades. For now, I am quite content to place a hearty “Yes, we need it” on the simple fact that the vast majority of women who get abortions are not risking their lives to do so, a complete reversal of that statistic over the last 40 years.

Because we all know that making it illegal will make it disappear… not.

I hate having to deal with this tiresome canard, but you’re wrong. The best estimate I’ve been able to find from a contemporary source estimating the prevalence of abortions in 1970s, is between 400-800,000. Taking the midpoint at 600,000, that’s about 50-60% of the number of abortions today, and about maybe 37% of the number at Peak Abortion (which was back in the late 1980s, I think). Abortions wouldn’t go away if we banned them, but the prevalence would probably be substantially reduced. Maybe even below the 1970 benchmark, for a variety of reasons. Legalization of abortion increases the number of people who have them, just as with anything else.

I’m happy to make affordable and quality child care a national priority, but I’m not going to stop sermonizing in between, because in order to end abortion you need both the carrot and the stick. The carrot is the child care, health care and other means of social welfare provision: the stick is the sermonizing.

Franklin, I too get irritated by my fellow socialist’s willingness to go into a rant about abortion as pre-natal murder every time someone mentions the subject. Its not really an ideological issue. There is a web site called godlessatheistsforlife. Stalin both freely allowed and ruthlessly banned abortion, as suited his whim. Nothing unites Protestants most focused on Rome as Whore of Babylon with devout Roman Catholics like the abortion issue, and nothing unites disobedient Roman Catholics (the majority) with less fundamentalist Protestants like support for Planned Parenthood. There are liberals who oppose abortion to, for an obvious reason:

From Hector’s point of view, and Erin Manning’s, and Rod Dreher’s as far as I know, abortion IS the murder of a fully independent person entitled to the full protection of the law. I’ve read eloquent essays by liberals about how the government should protect the least powerful in our society, and nothing is more helpless than a fetus.

If they are right about what abortion is, then the rest of their argument makes perfect sense. Hector of course is particularly unwilling to respond to the obvious arguments that it simply isn’t the murder of a human being at all, which is what makes his broadly worded tirades so tiresome.

A single cell is not a human being, even if it is epigenetically programmed to remove complex proteins and sugars from the maternal bloodstream and assemble them into a human being.

A so-called “heart beat” does not define a human being either, not when it is a primitive autonomic bio-pump running fluids around a tube of tissue that has no brain to speak of. (Tadpoles have heart beats).

Unlike any human person I might stab, shoot, strangle, skewer, burn alive, drown, etc., the fetus is growing INSIDE THE BODY of a fully developed adult, who certain other adults, like Hector, wish to coerce into keeping it inside because THEY think she should — although they are unable, even if willing, to take responsibility for their own preference by taking it into their body.

I could go on and on. Hector doesn’t have answers for this, neither does Erin or Rod, but they do have patent denials, BECAUSE they earnestly and sincerely BELIEVE that this is an act of murder.

And so we have no rational resolution. We are starting from diametrically opposite premises. If it IS murder then they are right. I don’t believe it is murder until there is a fully formed self-aware baby that could, if removed, survive outside the womb. At that point, removal is a delivery.

Hector, the sermonizing comment was meant to strongly imply hypocrisy on the part of the sermonizers. I don’t personally apply that to you, but I do make that general charge nonetheless.

Here’s the thing about the statistical claims on both sides: there is simply insufficient data on which to make a valid comparison, and I do mean in both directions. Besides, yours is the claim about how many, mine is the assertion about the potentially fatal dangers involved. We are not pounding on the same door, you and I.

This cannot be emphasized enough: In a time and place where abortions were illegal, no one can claim accurate numbers for the simple and obvious reason that women and those (vast majority of them men) who provided them with abortions are not going to step up and admit a crime. We know they happened from inferences, anecdotal accounts and a bit of forensics.